Choosing Hospitals

Choosing hospitals, like choosing insurance, seems like a super daunting task. Sure you can look at the newsmagazine "Best of..." lists but they are at best quasi-scientific and probably have little to do with the experience that one individual will actually have. You can also visit the Medicare Hospital Compare website but again it is a bunch of statistics that may or may not be relevant. A couple questions come to mind as I look at the stats on their site:
- Since these stats/surveys are about/from Medicare patients, who are generally older, sicker, and less well educated than I am how do I translate them for my own use?
- When I am wading through the stats how do I know what is a significant difference. Look at this graph about how well nurses communicated with patients. Does a 5% difference really mean that one is better than another? I assume that the sample size is large enough that these numbers are meaningful but they could be skewed by the department that most of the patients were in.

Ok so I haven't solved anything but at least I made a note that there is a place where you can get survey results that provide statistics about hospitals and that you can use these in an attempt to compare one hospital to another.

HealthCare could be better...

As a Kaiser patient ordering from their mail order pharmacy involved logging in to the website and entering some information about the prescription I wanted filled and my credit card number. Since their docs enter the prescriptions in their system the pharmacy fills it and sends it to me.

Now that I have Aetna I have to go to my doctor, give them a form, which they fax to Aetna, and then I send Aetna a payment, and then Aetna sends me the medicine. The Chipotle add that says "1984 called and they want their fax machine back" comes to mind.

Thankfully our health care system gives me "choices" and since my employer dropped Kaiser I got to choose Aetna. I think Aetna is typical and Kaiser is the exception with regards to computerized records and I find this amazing (in a bad way).